


Erase Rebuild Repeat

by deathwailart



Category: Christian Bible, Christian Bible (Old Testament), Mythology - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe, Apocalypse, Apple of Eden, F/M, cycles, forbidden knowledge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-10
Updated: 2013-06-10
Packaged: 2017-12-14 12:54:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/837115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathwailart/pseuds/deathwailart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Erase, rebuild and repeat.  Every time it's the same; the world spirals out of control, everything is destroyed save for a few remnants of humanity and it falls to them to shepherd and guide their children so they won't repeat the mistake of past civilisations or so they'll heed the warning signs before it's too late.</p>
<p>Eve has lost track of how many times she has done this now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Erase Rebuild Repeat

She can remember the sting of creation, how it tasted of fire and honey, hot and sweet and heavy on her tongue as she was fashioned from a single rib of Adam's. Neither of them had names then and she stood before him naked and unashamed and he was equally bare, looking at her in wonder and awe. And then he had smiled and taken her hand, leading her through the garden paradise that comprised their entire world. It was so beautiful – tall trees letting green light filter down, a vivid blue sky with drifting smudges of pure white cloud. Bright flowers, both intricate and simple, each with a scent of its own – there was too much to take in. Neither of them tired then. Countless hours they explored, plucking ripe fruits from the trees they could climb with such ease, biting into smooth flesh, allowing the sticky juices to run down their skin.  
  
She felt so much.  
  
The tart burst of berries. The kiss of evening rain. The scrape of bark and thorns and stone. No hunger though – days could pass as they roamed and explored, high in the treetops, nesting in the canopies with beautiful birds that trilled and cooed and fluttered. Or other days where she and him mapped out the planes of one another, so caught up in the beauty that stared back. They still went without names. What need was there? He was the only man and she the only woman, marvels of pure creation and life. There weren't even words. They seldom strayed far enough from one another to need them.  
  
Until one day, high in a tree, she spotted the wall.  
  
And so down Eve clambered and raced to it, palming the cold unforgiving surface. She knew nothing beyond the garden. She thought it was the whole world. So she walked, a hand always outstretched and it took her so far until she lost track of how long it had been since she set off so she looked to him and from the lack of worry in his eyes, she took it to mean that she had not been gone long.  
  
When she began to look for ways to climb he did nothing, merely watched. She fell many times but he helped her up and observed her making painstaking progress until finally she reached the top and let out a triumphant sound, mimicking one of their bright, pretty birds and she waved for him to follow.  
  
He did not.  
  
Once she had learned, she scaled the high wall easily and ventured there at all hours to gaze out at the uncharted wilderness that stretched before her as strange feelings stirred.  
  
Much later she would put names to them: longing, pain, hunger, thirst.  
  
For now though she watched the sun set, casting the land in shadows until she made her way down. This time though it was not him waiting for her but a serpent, coiled about the untouched fruit, marked as forbidden. The serpent was a beast she and him avoided; cool to the touch, those narrowed slit eyes, that hissing, the flickering tongue.  
  
But the fruit caught her eye.  
  
She bent, examined the red gleam of it, recalled the red of the dirt outside the wall as the sun began to dip below the horizon. She tested the weight of it in her hand. Hunger and thirst shot through her.  
  
She took a bite. Sweeter than any other fruit, juicier and all at once she had words. She had knowledge. The serpent gazed up at her and for the first time in her garden she felt fear. She ran for him, the fruit – apple, it had a name - clutched tight in her palm and she cried her first tears. When she caught sight of him, heat flooded her cheeks and she hid behind a tree, hand outstretched. He thought she was playing a game and laughed, head tossed back. But he saw her face, the worry, the tears and he took the fruit from her and before she could say anything (although how could she with all those strange words cluttering her mind and how would he have understood?) he too had taken a bite, falling to his knees, crying out.  
  
"Adam," she said. Dust it meant, for he was fashioned from it.  
  
"Eve," he said. Living one.  
  
They were man and woman with naught but their nakedness and names and this new addition to their lives.

* * *

  
  
_She sits in a small café, sipping tea. A young man asks if he can join her and she nods and smiles._  
  
_"What's your name?" He asks after a second of hesitation._  
_  
She dusts imaginary crumbs from her skirt before answering. "Eve."_  
_  
"Like Adam and Eve?"_  
  
_She hates her name. Coincidentally she hates whoever wrote the Bible. They got the damn thing wrong._  
  
_It's 2013. She knows down to the second how long it's been since she last saw Adam. She bites into her apple tart and looks up as the bell above the door jingles. Right on time._

* * *

  
  
A voice boomed, above them, below them, all around them. They cowered, she and Adam, clutching at one another, wearing what they could to cover themselves. It vibrated through Adam's bones and thus through hers but she managed to hold her head high – she did not regret it, perhaps she would but in that moment she did not. Knowledge was a heady thing that made her shudder, made her strong. She stood before Adam with her head high as their punishment was handed to them.  
  
They were cast out and cursed.  
  
Eve still thought the knowledge they gained was worth it. Even if she was called temptress. Eve who gifted sin upon them. A woman who did not know her place. A woman who did not listen.

* * *

  
  
_She's shopping with a few friends, teachers like her who spend their days working with the little ones, showing them how to write their names, sounding out the alphabet. Eve enjoys her work; it is impossible to grow tired of teaching, she thinks, when there is always something new to be learned by the teacher._  
  
_"This would look great on you!" One of them announces and holds a necklace against Eve's slender throat, a delicate gold chain with a shiny red apple attached to it. She cranes her neck to try to see herself in the little mirror on the rail and that is when she catches him out the corner of her eye but when she turns to look he is already gone._  
  
_She'll see him soon, she knows it._

* * *

  
  
They were cast out into the dirt and bare rock, a filthy little stream and a few parched and sun scorched trees all the eye could see. This was their punishment, to toil for untold years, unable to use all the things that will exist eons into the future. The going was hard. Eve tried to climb the walls again but they were too smooth, not a foothold or spot for fingers to grip and for two days she and Adam sat in the long shadows it cast to escape the baking sun. At night they shivered, teeth chattering. They did not speak, not until the third day when Adam sighed and got to his feet.  
  
"We have to move."  
  
She took his hand, recalled their first meeting and wept.  
  
Out in the hard sun they toiled and she grew heavy with child but still had no choice but to work even as the babe sat low in her belly, tossing and turning. What world was this child being born in? There would be nothing beautiful here for so long, none of what she had seen for the future, not for a long time but she knew she and Adam would do their best to try for their children. Labour, when it came, was agony. It would hurt all her daughters to come but from that fruit that she could still taste, taunting her with its sweetness, she had seen what was to come. Sitting in what little shade they had cobbled together she sweated, strained and bled with the cramps and pains that came in waves. Worth it though to hold Cain in her arms. Worth it again to hold Abel. Her boys. Her sweet boys she would sacrifice anything for. Even cast out she gave thanks to the Lord for her sons; without him there would be no Adam, without Adam there would be no her and so she raised them with love and wept in secret for what they would not see, a future that seemed so far away.  
  
Abel loved his flock, such hardy beasts who flourished on what little there was. Cain tended to the land and both offered up tribute to the Lord – Eve looked on with Adam at their sons, viewing them with love and pride but uneasiness. They had known only hardship – might they have known what she and Adam had known? These were the moments where she swallowed bitter regrets. They were the first parents of their people in flesh and blood under the baking sun and a parent should have more to offer than this pathetic scrape of a life. And there were the things they could not speak of. A time when they had no tongue, no names, when they had all they could ever want, paradise ripe around them.  
  
When the Lord looked upon one son with high regard and the other with little, worry gnawed at her. Cain's fury was something to behold in the way he brooded. He would not divulge what he had been told but she could see the weight of it upon his shoulders, the crease in his brow, the dark look in his eye.  
  
"Cain," she urged, "Cain I see a shadow slithering about your ankles, coiling up to seize you by the throat."  
  
Cain did not listen.  
  
There was more to this punishment.

* * *

  
  
_A needle buzzes high and fast, sets her teeth on edge. Somehow she can hear it over the heavy bass of the tattoo shop as a man in purple latex gloves works away on her. He has his hair shaved on one side, long on the other, a piercing through his nose and his ears are covered in metal, loops and studs and colourful plugs. He's friendly and he tells her jokes whenever he thinks she's been quiet too long, glancing up at her. She can see herself reflected in his eyes when he does that and she looks unbelievably pale and ashen, her own eyes wide even though the pain isn't a great ordeal._  
  
_She has felt much worse; after all, she gave birth far more than once._  
  
_"Lookin' good there Eve," he says and she manages a smile, "you'll look good enough to eat. You agree, right Adam? Some of my best work here."_

* * *

  
  
The mark of Cain they would come to call it and oh how she wept, great heaving sobs of rage and a grief she could scarcely fathom. If she and Adam and all descended from them were outcasts then what was Cain? The fury that seized her was wild and she had never thought herself capable of violence beyond that which was necessary to hunt and to defend their home against the wild creatures. The Lord had been the one to sentence Cain and again she had heard his voice and felt it rumble beneath her feet and vibrate in the air around her. Cain would live out his days with a mouth full of blood, toiling for nothing. He would be welcome nowhere.  
  
Long did she mourn her youngest babe. Sweet Abel who loved his lambs and had sacrificed the fattest of them in the name of the Father along with a portion of his flock. She had loved them both equally and had grieved even as she raised them for all that she could not provide. But she and Adam lay together again as man and wife where for so long they had been parents lost in their grief, two ancient souls who had known more hardship than they knew what to do with. And then came Seth. And after Seth more sons and daughters who went out into the world, went far and wide with the ones she and Adam had watched for so long – they taught them what they could, things that they had taught to their sons and daughters and they prospered. The world had changed and she and Adam had walked so far that if they looked over their shoulders they could no longer see the high stone walls that had marked their former home.  
  
At long last she and Adam finally parted. There was no argument, no discussion. One day she walked one way and he another. They would find each other again – he was dust in the wind and she was his missing rib. For now they'd done their part and she was content to roam and teach and forget.  
  
But she never forgot. Not really.

* * *

  
  
_This is what they do. The world falls apart when signs are not heeded. There is war, there is famine, there is plague, there is pollution – it never matters in the end, it simply repeats and they claim that they will remember the last time. But only she and Adam do, the first, the oldest, the everlasting who know all and who try to guide them again and again until it has been set to right. Millennia can pass between them seeing one another as they go their separate ways each time once they have let them recover and build anew._  
  
_Eve doesn't know if this is a punishment or not. She's old and tired sometimes and young and fumbling at others. She guides them as best she can and treasures her moments with Adam because Adam is her husband, the only one for her and she for him; they are bound in bone and blood and grief and ecstasy, they are tainted by the sin with forbidden fruit crisp and tart upon their lips. Perhaps they were always meant to sin for it is only their knowledge that allows the world to rebuild again._  
  
_She does not think of how the knowledge lets them tear themselves down again. She has to balance her pain carefully._

* * *

  
  
"Do you ever wonder," asked Adam as they made their way between survivors who clutched one another or what few possessions they could still hold, "what would have happened if we had never eaten the fruit?"  
  
Eve took a moment to respond, bending to pick up a doll to give to a tiny girl with blood and soot matting her hair. "I try not to. It makes all of this harder, this very moment." The mother - thankfully, this child still had a mother - snatched her up and held her close and Eve nodded. She had seen that look so many times before. Adam was still looking at her though so she sighed and brushed her hands on her ruined clothes. "I can still see us, in the Garden, but I cannot see our children," she swallowed the lump that rose in her throat, "not Cain nor Abel nor Seth or all the rest. Only you and I."  
  
"Terribly lonely," Adam replied, golden and beautiful, still able to offer her a small smile as they scouted the area. It was the same as it had been the previous two occasions and how it had been when they had been alone for all those years; find supplies, find a place with some shelter and lead this group of survivors. And then reach out their minds for others and zip back and forth, back and forth. "We wouldn't even have speech."  
  
"Sometimes words are more trouble than they're worth."  
  
"I forget how you can be," he said quietly and she stopped, almost wanting to cry but her tears had been for that last night before all of this had been set in motion.  
  
"How can I not be? I was the one to cause all this."  
  
"You saw life beyond the wall, this would still have happened but then who would guide them, who would shepherd them? You're Eve, you're the mother of all living things."  
  
She smiled, wiped the sweat from his brow with a shaking hand and then took his.  
  
"There should be a stream not too far from here and we can boil up the water. That'll be one thing out the way."  
  
"At least the ground isn't too badly damaged," he added and she knew that look in his eyes, it was that determined look when he had toiled long hours to plant crops in scorched, barren earth, "things can still be grown and with water close, they can feed themselves at least. Other places..."  
  
"I saw," she shuddered, despite the heat from small pockets of fire scattered here and there that no one had thought to put out, "this is a bad one Adam."  
  
"And there will be more to come."  
  
They both drew to a halt at the stream, a small trickle of thing but still clear, still cool when she cupped it in her hands. The ground was higher here and Adam turned her to look down at this little pocket of life that had somehow survived an unspeakable horror.  
  
"These are our children Eve, these dirty, lost, beautiful creatures. They're ours."  
  
She clutched tight to Adam's hand and stood as tall and proud as she ever had.

**Author's Note:**

> So influences basically:
> 
> i. The Bible obviously: Adam and Eve narrative, Eve, The Fall of Man, The Tree of the knowledge of good and evil, The Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel & Seth
> 
> ii. Whilst the apple Adam and Eve ate was a normal apple it contained all the knowledge of all that ever was and all that will ever be. The Pieces of Eden from Assassin's Creed should not be overlooked as inspiration for the knowledge they possessed.
> 
> iii. Ragnarök; Adam and Eve are trapped in a cycle of the world ending with only small pockets of humanity surviving. This will continue, she and Adam rebuilding, until the Book of Revelation occurs when they will both be judged and die. Eve is sure they will be judged as evil, Adam remains more hopeful and thinks that they will finally be forgiven.
> 
> iv. Daybreak, Part II, a Battlestar Galactica episode, is drawn upon for inspiration for what happened with the children of Cain and Seth. Also, the parts of Caprica Six and Baltar (not the messenger counterparts though) with them going off to farm; this is what Adam and Eve did although there was a lot of toiling involved first.
> 
> v. God creating evolution outside of the Garden was inspired by a Supernatural episode - 6.20 The Man Who Would Be King - or more specifically part of a quote:
> 
> Castiel: I remember being at a shoreline, watching a little grey fish heave itself up on the beach. And an older brother saying, "Don't step on that fish, Castiel, big plans for that fish. I remember the Tower of Babel - all 37 feet of it, which I suppose was impressive at the time. And when it fell they howled, "Divine Wrath!" But come on, dried dung can only be stacked so high.


End file.
